I have to say I’ve been happy up until now. The tax bill was due in yesterday and when I went online to pay it, my card was declined. I quickly called up the Abbey to hear that due to a technical fault, no card transactions were being authorised! That’s not right is it? To make matters worse, the business support team finish at 1pm on Saturday and the domestic support just refuse to talk to business customers. I tried again to make the payment this morning and it’s still out of order. Maybe the abbey can’t afford to lose all that dosh in one day. I bet I’m not the only one trying to pay the tax man this weekend. But will they be stumping up the £100 late payment penalty they’re costing me and everyone else they’ve let down? We’ll see.

Thanks for the tip! I just tried the same thing and it worked, you can move money between accounts at the ATM. I wish Abbey business banking people could have told me that earlier. I tried today to move money online and it’s no surprise that it doesn’t work either.

I applied for a new Abbey accounts for another of my businesses earlier this month and (some) of the documentation has only just come through. Much of the information is wrong and I wish I’d just used a different bank.

Time to shop for a new bank in the new year I think!

I get into my car and drive to my local Abbey branch at the Metro Centre in Gateshead. I spend twenty minutes looking for a parking space and then another 10 minutes walking to the bank. I go to the bank’s ATM machine and transfer some funds and pay some bills. I get back into my car and drive home.

The whole episode takes around an hour. This is still far quicker than calling customer services and doing it all over the phone!!

Thanks for your informative post.

Yes, I’m still having problems. And everyone I speak to who uses Abbey is also having problems. Your comment expresses the dilemma well, the only option any of us business customers has is to use phone banking and wait in the huge queues. Last time I called there were apparantly 600 people in the queue ahead of me, and that’s why it took 30 minutes to get to speak to a person.

I haven’t left Abbey yet, but I’ll have a look in the new year. The Co-operative looks good, but it will be interesting to see what the other banks can offer for the exodus of (ex)Abbey customers!

Are you still having problems? I am – when I try to log in I’m told that I don’t have any accounts associated with this log in name. This is odd as when I first created a new login etc I actually managed to access the system fine. It was just the next day that it all went wrong.

I don’t really want to call customer ‘services’ as I don’t want to be in a queue for an hour only to be told that there is a problem and it’s being looked at and we apologise for the inconvenience etc, etc . . .

My application form to a different bank is already in the post. I called the Co-Operative Bank and set the wheels in motion – as I’m a member of the FSB it looks like an excellent deal as there are concessions. When I called them the phone was answered on the fourth ring and a human (yes! A human!!) spoke to me. I didn’t have to press any numbers on the keypad, and I didn’t have to wait whilst being told that my call was important, I just spoke to a guy on the phone who basically managed to do everything I wanted without needing to transfer me to another department and all that!

So far with Abbey I’m completely stuck. I can’t bank on-line, I can’t bank via telephone banking as the queues are too big and I can’t get through, and I can’t even use the counter at my local Abbey branch. My money is just sitting there and I simply can’t reach it. This is inexcusable. I’ll now wait until my account at my new bank is open, transfer all the cash in there, let the new bank sort out all the direct debits in their account transfer package and then start the new year fresh.

Hopefully it will all be resolved soon! Thanks for the post Mike, you’ve written down what a lot of people are thinking!!

You know those little gizmos are a great idea. I’ve heard you can even get one for your PayPal account. Anything but remembering a whole heap of information…

Hopefully they’ll get it all sorted before Christmas.

Sorry to hear about this Mike. Banks can be a PITA.

On my account we have an eight digit code, a pasword or pin and a little electronic gizmo that generates a six digit code randomly within a “range” for that account. Would seem to be a better system – as long as you don’t drop your gizmo into your cofee – I experienced that and the gizmo does not like it…

I’m considering moving to another bank. Although to be honest, Abbey have been very good up to this point. Their old online banking system, while not bells and whistles, was very reliable and worked well. I do have contacts at Abbey, but they’ve all stopped answering their phones and their voicemails are full (and as of today: email is returned with a 500 permission denied error).

I moved my business to Abbey this summer (and currently in the process of moving another business to Abbey), having migrated from Lloyds TSB (business) who I was with for five years. Our charges were around £20/25 per month, and the logic was to cut costs by ~£300/year (over five years that’s about £1.5k – not too shabby).

The trouble with Abbey is not just the way in which they’ve handled the upgrades, but also the customer support. This post is intended as a highlight of their technical incompetance and customer service failure. (Incidentally, I get around 200 hits/day on this article alone).

As I write this, Abbey still have the same problems and are still recommending that I upgrade FireFox to the old version 2 (their tech support link goes to the version 3 download), or Internet Explorer. Apparantly, the only thing they’ve managed to fix was to spend £100 or so and get themselves an in-date SSL certificate.

I’m not feeling the love from Abbey at the moment, and from a purely technical perspective I can’t imagine how they could have performed this migration worse….

I also wonder why they don’t hire themselves a few good, honest contractors to come in and sort the mess out

Its got to be asked. If you are having so many problems with Abbey, why not move to another Bank. I am with natwest, and ok, I have to pay business banking fees (which cost me around £16 a month), but I can go into the branch in town and upstairs is their maned business centre, I have the direct email address, mobile number and home phone number of my business manager (who I have had since day 1), and I have never had any problems with the account.